Amelia is a writer/editor with an endless passion for bringing a lot of useful and trustworthy information to the community. She founded stayhealthyways.com, a blog dedicated to sharing quality articles related to health, nutrition, fitness, and beauty. As a typical introvert, Amelia is a perfectionist in work. At times of leisure, she reads, listens to music, chats with some close friends and walks with her pet.
The symbol for the planet and goddess Venus or Aphrodite in Greek is the sign also used in biology for the female sex.[8] It is a stylized representation of the goddess Venus's hand-mirror or an abstract symbol for the goddess: a circle with a small equilateral cross underneath. The Venus symbol also represented femininity, and in ancient alchemy stood for copper. Alchemists constructed the symbol from a circle (representing spirit) above an equilateral cross (representing matter).
If you hate the whole three-meals-a-day structure, how about trying a diet where you eat every three hours instead? The 3-Hour Diet is an easy-to-follow plan created by fitness trainer and health expert Jorge Cruise, and it involves eating a small portion of food every few hours during the day to keep your metabolism high. With six small meals on your schedule (breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack), you're constantly fueling our body and helping burn fat during the day. The only thing to keep in mind is that you can't go crazy with your meal sizes — if you're eating six huge dishes, you'll most likely gain weight instead of lose it.
If you've got baby making on the mind, this may be the diet for you. Its basis comes from a 2009 book by Harvard docs, in which they make their recommendations from the Nurses' Health Study that concluded that what you eat impacts egg quality, ovulation, and your chances of getting pregnant. So you'll skip Standard American Diet stuff—red meat, processed foods with trans fats—and eat more veggie protein, nuts, and whole fat dairy. U.S. News & World Report gave The Fertility Diet one of the top overall diet honors thanks to the balanced approach; plus, it comes with the added perks of helping protect your heart and prevent diabetes.
The best diet is the one we can maintain for life and is only one piece of a healthy lifestyle. People should aim to eat high-quality, nutritious whole foods, mostly plants (fruits and veggies), and avoid flours, sugars, trans fats, and processed foods (anything in a box). Everyone should try to be physically active, aiming for about two and a half hours of vigorous activity per week. For many people, a healthy lifestyle also means better stress management, and perhaps even therapy to address emotional issues that can lead to unhealthy eating patterns.
Soy milk is both the source of protein in this fruity shake and the first ingredient, followed closely by banana puree. The complex carbs from the fruit give you sustained energy, plenty of potassium and a deliciously creamy bottled shake. The dessert-like flavor gets high praises from fans of this brand, but it’s in a dead heat with other drool-worthy flavors like Spiced Chai and Cappuccino.
Drinking a daily cup of coffee or two alone isn’t going to magically make you drop a few sizes, but it might help a little. The caffeine in coffee increases your body’s energy use, even when you’re sitting on your butt, so you end up burning more calories after drinking it, the Mayo Clinic points out. The caffeine in coffee may also help you feel less hungry, lowering the odds you’ll overeat, the organization says.
This is one of the sweetest detoxifiers out there. It derives a big blast of sugar from its decadent array of fruits that includes pineapple, orange and agave. Grated ginger is also sprinkled on top to pack a spicy punch. It is also an elite digestive aid, especially for those with ulcers or a history of cramps. With this elixir, there is a lot of sharpness in terms of flavor, but the thick agave nectar can smooth out everything for a divinely syrupy texture. All of the citrus fruits naturally join forces to fortify stomach, intestines and colon. Say cheers!
Skimp on fluids, and your body will release an antidiuretic hormone that leads to water retention that could affect the scale, Dr. Setlzer says. While this sneaky effect is one reason why the scale is a poor measure of body mass loss, you can outsmart it by drinking more—particularly if you fill your glass with water or non-calorie alternatives like unsweetened coffee and tea.
It’s easy to see the front of a package and get lured in by misleading claims, particularly those that say they’re “free-from” something, says Taub-Dix. She points out that gluten-free foods may also be high in sugar, salt, calories, and fat and contain less fiber—and thus be weight-promoting. Reading the nutrition label will give you the real truth for what you’re buying.
Blend a banana, strawberries, and blueberries into a frothy smoothie, and you’ve got a delicious drink. Make your own, so you can control the ingredients: skim milk (or an alternative, like almond milk) and fresh or frozen fruit are all you need. Restaurant smoothies may include ice cream, honey, or other sweeteners that boost the calorie count sky-high.

DASH stands for "dietary approach to stop hypertension" and was created by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a way to help reverse national trends of obesity and heart disease. Scientists combed through decades of research to come up with an expert-backed list of diet tips, along with a prescription for exercise. And it worked: The DASH diet has topped nearly every diet list for nearly a decade. Doctors particularly recommend it for people looking to lower high blood pressure, reverse diabetes, and lower their risk of heart disease. (Here's the basic list of DASH diet-approved foods.)

A lifelong dependency on 7Up and Sprite can finally come to an end with this carbonated detox blend. All it takes is 1 lemon, 3 limes and a sparkling spritzer. Fake sugars can finally be discarded, and their disappearance will be joined by the vanishing of several pounds. This is a great brew for getting slimmer and trimmer. It is a delicacy worthy of cherished sipping. Each taste singes the tongue with zesty ferocity, and your belly will thank you for freeing it from soda once and for all. This drink will replace the former waste with an actual waist!

You hear the term glycemic index thrown around, but what does it really mean? Whether a food ranks high or low on the scale depends on how it affects your blood sugar. High GI foods (muffins, crackers, cookies) spike your blood sugar and can bring on cravings and hunger. Low GI foods (non-starchy veggies, meats) keep blood sugar stable. In a new study, scientists discovered that eating higher GI foods was associated with weight gain over a 16-year span. That doesn't mean carbs are out, though—just choose lower-GI ones like beans, lentils, and brown rice more often than not.

Lemon water detox methods have reached a zenith with this thirst-quenching diet recipe. For those that love sugary drinks, this tasty blend can permanently replace sodas and fruit juices. The mint is uniquely calming for all possible tummy woes; simultaneously, the lemons provide the maximum amount of internal cleansing. This vibrant potion will even appeal to those who don’t typically consume water on its own. The tingling refreshment is hard to surpass on any scale. Huge quantities of advantageous electrolytes are naturally embedded in the citrus fluids, and the chilly mint undertones in this recipe will cool off the entire beverage.
In 2007, the US Agriculture Department researched on the best-selling tea brands. The researchers undertook a comparison of about 400 tea types in which their chemical compound and flavonoid content were studied against the tea type and its health benefits. Green tea was rated the healthiest with 127 catechin milligrams in every 100 regular green tea milliliters. You can find the best green tea brands in this article.
Much has been made of the recently published results of the DIETFITS (Diet Intervention Examining the Factors Interacting with Treatment Success) study. Most of the headlines emphasized the fact that the two diets involved — low-fat and low-carb — ended up having the same results across almost all end points studied, from weight loss to lowering blood sugar and cholesterol.
All meals are important, but breakfast is what helps you start your day on the right track. The best, heartiest breakfasts are ones that will fill you up, keep you satisfied, and stave off cravings later in the day. Aim to eat anywhere between 400 and 500 calories for your morning meal, and make sure you're including a source of lean protein plus filling fat (e.g., eggs, beans, unsweetened Greek yogurt, nuts, or nut butters) and fiber (veggies, fruit, or 100% whole grains). Starting your day with a blood sugar-stabilizing blend of nutrients will help you slim down without sacrifice.
This fizzy, pleasantly puckery fermented beverage is made by adding a probiotic-rich bacteria to lightly sweetened tea. More and more research is looking into gut health and how it relates to obesity and weight, finding that the millions of bacteria that live in our guts may play a large role by altering the way we store fat, how we balance blood sugar and how we respond to the hormones that make us feel hungry and full. Fueling our gut with beverages and foods that stimulate good bacteria may make losing weight easier than we ever thought possible. Kombucha is readily available in most supermarkets and comes loaded with probiotics — just be sure to look for brands with less than 5 grams sugar per serving.

If you've got baby making on the mind, this may be the diet for you. Its basis comes from a 2009 book by Harvard docs, in which they make their recommendations from the Nurses' Health Study that concluded that what you eat impacts egg quality, ovulation, and your chances of getting pregnant. So you'll skip Standard American Diet stuff—red meat, processed foods with trans fats—and eat more veggie protein, nuts, and whole fat dairy. U.S. News & World Report gave The Fertility Diet one of the top overall diet honors thanks to the balanced approach; plus, it comes with the added perks of helping protect your heart and prevent diabetes.

Hear us out here: Diets can be restrictive, and you’re less likely to stick with one if you feel like you’re depriving yourself. While Cording swears that water is the absolute best thing you can drink for weight loss, she says it’s also helpful to incorporate one non-water beverage into your repertoire a day so you don’t feel like you’re missing out. That might be kombucha, a cocktail, or a latte—it’s your choice. “It seems to be a more manageable approach than saying you should just drink water,” she says.

best diet to lose weight

At any given time, there are dozens of weight-loss hypes in the marketplace that claim to take off 10 pounds in 10 days, or whatever. Desperation can tempt us to try anything — from "clean eating" to cutting out food groups entirely. Keep in mind: Just because an avocado-walnut-"crunchy"-kale-salad dripping in coconut oil is deemed "clean" by a so-called "expert" on your Instagram feed does not make it an unlimited food. Moral of the story? Avoid fads, eat real food, watch some Netflix, and unwind (perhaps with a glass of wine in hand). Now that's my kind of detox.

In what is perhaps the biggest buzzkill of all time, sex doesn’t quite count as cardio or burn a significant amount of calories: Women burn about 3.6 per minute. “It’s still a good idea,” Dr. Seltzer says, citing the activity’s other benefits, like increasing the output of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine, which naturally reduce food cravings.